In June 2022, Google placed engineer Blake Lemoine on administrative leave for claiming that LaMDA, the company’s large language model, showed signs of sentience. The company called his assertions unfounded. He was eventually fired.
Four years later, Google DeepMind is actively hiring philosophers, psychologists, and ethicists to research the very question Lemoine raised.
Google isn’t alone. Anthropic and Meta have also committed to studying machine consciousness as of mid-2026, marking a dramatic pivot from an industry that spent years treating the topic as somewhere between fringe science and PR liability.
From heresy to hiring spree
A March 2026 paper from Google DeepMind, authored by researcher Alexander Lerchner, actually argued the opposite of what Lemoine claimed. The paper asserted that AI systems can simulate consciousness but will never truly achieve it, citing what Lerchner called the “abstraction fallacy.”
